Until the fire can be, by
one means or another and for the time being, put out, he has no energies
worth mentioning, to devote to anything else. And, just as no woman can
understand the cold austerities of the cell into which a man must retire
in order to give his finer faculties free play, so no man can possibly
understand, although objective evidence may compel him to admit and
chronicle it as a fact, that a woman borne along as Rose was, upon an
irresistible tide of passions, memories and hopes, which all but made
her absent husband actually visible to her, could at the same time, be
seeing visions of her accomplished work and laying plans--limpid
practicable plans, for their realization.
This is, perhaps, one of the few, and certainly one of the most
fundamental chasms of cleavage between the two sexes; a chasm bridged by
habit invariably, because some sort of thoroughfare has to exist,
bridged, too, more rarely, by intellectual understanding. But never
bridged, I think, between two persons strongly masculine and feminine
respectively, by an instinctive sympathy.
Pages:
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556